Cross Stitch Grid

Chart paper with the counting already built in

Squares of two and a half millimetres, in grey, with a heavier line every ten. One square, one stitch.

The ten-square rhythm is not arbitrary. Published cross stitch charts are ruled in tens, patterns are counted in tens, and finding your place on a chart means counting blocks rather than individual squares. Paper ruled every five will fight you the whole way through a design.

Why 2.5 mm

It is small enough to fit a real design on one sheet and large enough to put a symbol in.

An A4 sheet holds 73 stitches across and 94 down. On 14-count aida that works out at roughly 13 by 17 cm of finished stitching, which covers most small motifs and a good many samplers without taping sheets together.

If you are designing something larger, work in sections on separate sheets and number them, rather than reaching for a finer grid — below about 2 mm the squares stop taking a legible symbol.

Symbols, not colours

Colour in the squares if you like, but write a symbol in each one as well.

Three reasons. A photocopied or scanned chart loses its colour and keeps its symbols. Similar shades cannot be told apart on paper, and every project has three greens that look identical under a lamp, whereas two symbols never do. And a symbol maps to a thread number, which is the thing you actually buy.

Keep a key in the margin: symbol, thread number, colour name.

Finding the centre first

Mark the centre of the chart before you draw, and mark the centre of the fabric before you stitch. Every counted design is worked outward from the middle, because starting at a corner means any small error accumulates in one direction and the design ends up off-centre on the fabric.

The bold ten-lines make the centre easy to find and easy to mark.

What else this paper does

The same grid works for knitting charts, filet crochet, beadwork, perler bead layouts and pixel art. Anything counted in unit squares with a ten-square rhythm.

Note that knitting stitches are not square — they are wider than they are tall — so a design charted on square paper comes out squashed when knitted. For that, use the graph paper generator with different cell width and height.

Settings and printing

The 2.5 mm grid with bold tens is the preset. A4, US Letter or US Legal.

Print at 100%. At this cell size, any scaling is enough to make the squares awkward to write in.